Networking services have become increasingly important in today's society. In certain architectures, service providers may seek to offer multicast services for their end users. ‘Multicast’ refers to the delivery of information to a group of destinations simultaneously using the most efficient strategy. Delivery of messages over each link of the network happens only once: creating copies only when the links to the destinations split.
IP Multicast is a technique for one, to many, communications over an IP infrastructure. It scales to a larger receiver population by not requiring prior knowledge of whom or how many receivers are present. Multicast utilizes network infrastructure efficiently by requiring the source to send a packet only once, even if it needs to be delivered to a large number of receivers. The nodes in the network take care of replicating the packet to reach multiple receivers.
An IP Multicast group address is used by sources and by the receivers to send and receive content. Sources use the group address as the IP destination address in their data packets. Receivers use this group address to inform the network that they are interested in receiving packets sent to that group. At the forefront of all these operations is cost because the links that carry this data are expensive.
Accordingly, the ability to optimize communication links in the context of multicasting activities presents a significant challenge to network administrators, component manufacturers, and system designers alike.